SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (SSNC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So why don't we get started? Next up, we're thrilled to host Rahul Kanwar, the CEO and President of SS&C in our financial conference. I came down just for this because I think it's a terrific outcome for investors and really just a terrific story and we're thrilled to have you. We've done these in the past. One of the things that we started with is just a little bit of background on SS&C. And part of that is just give the audience -- sometimes I feel like the market don't fully appreciate the complexity behind SS&C and just the evolution over time. And I think it's more relevant given some of the questions in the market today, but maybe just a little bit of background on SS&C and maybe some of the more meaningful acquisitions that have been done, start maybe a little bit on the beginning, a little bit of the 2018 transactions than some of the more recent ones like Calastone.

Great. And thank you for having us, Kevin. We really appreciate it, and thanks, everybody. So SS&C and what we do is we're mission-critical infrastructure for financial services and health care, right? And with that -- there's a lot of words there, so I'll unpack it a little bit. Mission-critical just means that, by and large, the things we do around the world are things that people have to have. There are things like net asset value calculations and tax reporting and regulatory reporting and reporting out to investors and managing pharmacy transactions and things like that. We've been doing this since 1986. We approach it through the lens of technology and using technology as a way to create real differentiators in our business. So whether that's Advent Geneva, which is one of the products that's probably the flagship product in the alternative industry or Intralinks, which is one of the leading data room products, so technology. And then -- and huge service components that have grown over time. So our fund administration business is the world's biggest fund administrator, our transfer agency and wealth business is the biggest transfer agent in those kinds of things. So in terms of kind of what you laid out in progression, I got to SS&C in 2005. And we're at that point, very much a software, a financial services software company and services company, and we had gotten into fund administration, which is kind of what I did at SS&C for the bulk of my career. So we built a fund administration business through a combination of building technology, taking care of customers and doing some strategic acquisitions along the way into the world's biggest administration business in 2018, we then took a pretty transformational leap in terms of we bought 3 businesses in the same year, DST systems being the biggest one, headquartered and I think headquartered in Kansas City took us from 800,000 people up to mid-20s, 25,000, 26,000 people. We also bought Intralinks, which is data room business, and we bought Eze, which is a front-end order management system. So we've been, for the last 5 years, 6 years, we've been -- in addition to doing all the things we've been working on getting those businesses integrated into our infrastructure and particularly in the case of the DST, get them to embrace sales and marketing, product development, customer attention the way we would want to do that. And we're pleased to see that over the last several quarters, we're seeing that show up in the financial results.

There's no doubt. And one thing I would like to highlight to since 2018, I think you've taken the leverage from about 7 turns of leverage down to 2.7%, and that centers on about $1.5 billion of free cash flow with the market value today about an 8.5% free cash flow yield that's giving you an opportunity to really reallocate some of that capital to share buyback, opportunistic acquisitions and dividend as well. So maybe talk about that a little bit, too, because it's -- it's one of these really unique opportunities where you're seeing accelerating organic growth, meaningful return to capital to shareholders and powerful margin expansion as well.

And thank you for that. So what we've tried really hard to do is be very disciplined when it comes to things like profitability and cash flow conversion and things like that. We've just -- we pay a lot of attention to that. So our one of the things we do almost immediately on an acquisition is just try to make sure we've got a path to get them to margin improvement and hopefully, to our corporate margins. So DST is a pretty good example of a little over $2 billion in revenue margins. And 18 months later, they were in the high 30s, right? So that excess EBITDA is obviously pretty valuable, and that helps with the cash flow generation. And once we have the -- it's also being disciplined about CapEx and being disciplined about where we're spending money, it's not -- we need to spend money. We understand that. We're just making sure it's being done in a productive way. And then using that to give money back to our shareholders and support the stock the best way we can. So in the last couple of years, it's been a mix of acquisitions, always first priority because the idea being that if you can find an acquisition, you're like enough, the return on that over time is going to be pretty significant. In general, we're looking at acquisitions that either expand our capability mix. So we've got 23,000 customers. If we can find one or 2 or 3 more things for them to buy that usually becomes pretty valuable. So those kinds of things. And then in the absence of that, we'll pay down debt and we'll buy back stock. And we've skewed a little bit more towards buying back stock over the last couple of years, maybe 60-something percent stock buybacks and 30-something percent debt, and that's about where we are.

M&A is in important segue because what thing I feel like you folks over -- consistently over time has always kind of positioned the company for the next phase of disruption, right? And the one I wanted to start with it maybe into the AI question is Blue Prism, right? Because you went out, you bought Blue Prism and that proved to be somewhat depressing a transaction and automation perspective. But maybe talk to that a little bit? And then part of our thesis is you folks are more relevant than ever in an AI world, but maybe talk to the go-to-market motion on that and bring fence out into where the retention sits today as well as just really, really just powerful growth in your clients in the assets under administrative. Because it's -- obviously, we get the question on AI a lot, and I don't think the really appreciate sometimes how nuanced critical and how important data security and so on and so forth. So maybe you spend some time there.

Sure. Sure. So I think the -- sort of the broader thing that I would orient you to is we view technology broadly as being opportunities for us to improve the quality of our products and services, create better relationships with our customers, get paid more and obviously, have that show up in our financial statements and be able to take care of our shareholders and our employees, right? So that's awfully broad. And I know it's a little bit like, okay, so what, right? But in some ways, AI is the same as -- it's the same as the Internet. It's the same as mobile. It's the same as cloud native. It's the same as a lot of other things in the sense that, hey, it's an opportunity, right now. It may be that it's a bigger opportunity, it's a bigger jump, whatever, all those things. But I think that the way we would approach this is the same, which is, okay, how does it help us, right? So and then how quickly we can employ on things that we've locked in on as being positive. So here are some things to think about, right? The first one being a lot of what we do is built around accounting, right? It's built around a general ledger and closed in, right? So our entire fund administration business is an accounting business, our transfer agency business is accounting for shareholder transactions. Our front office trading systems are accounting for trades and obviously, the related P&L and so on and so forth. What accounting systems require is they require ledgers and they require that when you close a period, the period sort of stays closed unless something changes, and usually, those aren't very popular. In our experiments to date, and I would say we're more than dabbling, Gen AI and things like that are really good at a lot of things, and they're going to help us, but they're particularly good at leaving things the same, right? And you can kind of see that in your own lives where if you go and ask ChatGPT a question that you asked last week, they'll get almost the same answer. But it won't be word forward the same. In accounting, it has to be work towards the same. It can't be that the model got smarter, and so the way we calculated your credit default swap portfolio is now a little bit on that kind of stuff, right? So it's just -- it's a mismatched technology. What we have found is, and we use them all. We use the big commercial providers. We have our own LLMs that we've deployed internally. We've got Blue Prism that we acquired that we have turned into more and more of an agentic AI story, and that's been a really big and powerful driver for us to kind of have head count efficiencies and productivity internally. So we know it works because we use it every single day. What we have found is that the parts where Gen AI is going to help us is much more on the stuff that's around the general ledger, around the net asset value. So inputs and outputs, right? So it's things like how do I receive data? How do I put out data, what kind of interfaces can I make available to customers to be able to interact with my applications? And then can I help them analyze text-heavy primarily things in ways that they couldn't do previously. So Intralinks, for example, which is our virtual data room system, now has an AI module where you can go in and say, okay, what's this company all about? And what are the risks? And here's 15 contracts, what are the legal terms. And here's all the litigation they've disclosed, which one should I worry about and so on and so forth, things that you would spend hours reading things you can now do instantly, which is what you would expect. The other thing that I would just orient you to briefly is, look, we're a tech company. We're deep in this ecosystem with whether it's fund accounting or regulatory reporting or tax reporting or any of those other things, we have access to all the source code, right? So every one of these applications, we own the source code. If there's somebody that's going to deploy AI or write code faster or better or whatever, we think we have a pretty good chance of doing that. That's been our experience to date. That's why we think we're really well positioned.

I may open it up to the audience if there's any questions around GenAI or AI or anything else at this point just because it's been such a -- and will continue to be hotly debated. But just any questions in the audience or online? Let's keep going on that because I think one of the other things, too, is maybe talk about the sensitivity of the data, right? I mean when you think about our sense maybe you can help dimensionalize in terms of the caliber of the clients you're servicing, right? And the importance of data security as well as just not having a public domain, we think is another huge advantage. But maybe talk to that a little bit, particularly given the growth you've had, again, in assets under administration for a real nice tailwind from a private asset allocation as well, just keeping up with complexity and data security theme.

Sure. Well, that's the -- you kind of get to very quickly, right? And Kevin, I appreciate you kind of raising that because you get very quickly from beyond what's the right technical answer, right? And on a vacuum what's the, hey, this is cool technology. Can you use it to, okay, how would you go about doing that, right? And then the reality is you've got these big financial institutions and in some cases, health care institutions that are heavily regulated. They got all kinds of considerations, both government imposed and off themselves, they're not going to take their client data. They're not going to take their investment data. They're not going to take their data that's not publicly available and go loaded up into some commercially available generative AI type model to be able to -- it's just -- it's not going to happen, right? Because even now, what that model learns from and how it reuses what it learns, is somewhat opaque, right? Nobody really knows, right? And there's all kinds of confidentiality issues with that. So instead, I think what we have found, what we're going to do and what we're doing already is we built a product called AI Gateway which allows us to run those large language models within SS&C in a very trusted, controlled, secure way when we can compartmentalize each customer's data to themselves and make available to them the functionality without kind of not knowing where the information went. And that's been pretty popular. The other part of this in terms of how you go about rolling all this out is, we're talking about organizations that already use dozens of systems. They might have something to manage their clients. They certainly have a finance department, and they've got their own ledgers, they've got reporting systems. They've got all kinds of things. And really, what they're looking for is a way to bring information that's resident in these systems together so that then you can use that to do useful things. That's what we would call orchestration. So we've got a product called Work HQ similar to our product called AI Gateway, that's all it does. It does orchestration. It builds the integration points for you, brings the data together and then allows you to use some of these technologies in a very, very controlled and secure way. Those are ways for us to take advantage of the opportunity that's out there, but in a way that's comfortable for our clients.

I think you're seeing it. And one of the things maybe we could talk a little bit about is the effect you're seeing across your organization internally because you've obviously been able to deliver some real nice margin expansion. And I think part of that is you've been able to really manage some of the head count growth, right, relative to history? And what's also impressed us a lot is some of the larger superannuation wins you've had, which maybe help us understand a little bit, probably not at SS&C kind of margins coming in and you've still been able to deliver the margin. So it's had a really nice impact across the core business, which I would think in theory for an opportunity to reinvest a little bit more too. Maybe talk about the margin impact.

Yes. So I think that the -- just maybe one final point on the AI thing, which kind of leads into all of this is we really do view technology as sort of being the way for us to drive the right operating metrics over time, whether that's profitability or the right level of service for the customers or something else. And so we have been able to, over the last 3 years or so, have virtually no growth in head count outside of if we do a lift out or an acquisition or something, keep head count pretty stable, even though the company has been growing. And I've been here, like I said, since 2005. So a little over 20 years. I've never seen that before. I've almost always seen when revenue goes up, head count goes up. I've never seen it just stay the same. And part of the reason we've been able to do it is because of this Blue Prism acquisition and the technology that we're rolling out across the place. So that's a really powerful story for our customers, many of whom are facing the same pressures that we're facing, right? And they would like to have better product, take advantage of the technology and at the same time, manage their expense base. And so when they see us do it and the way we're building these things, we're building them so that they can be deployed externally. So if we build something that scrubs credit agreements, we can go give it to a credit fund. When we build something that validates investor statements, that we can go give it to anybody that has third-party client statements that they put out. So that's been really powerful. So leading into the lift out part of the conversation, it's very, very relevant because in most cases, those companies are looking for the same thing. They have these infrastructures. They've got a lot of good people. They've got systems that they rely on, but they know they've got to take whatever that next step is. They've either got to upgrade their systems or they got to keep up with managing the head count or they're starting a new fund, and they've got some new regulatory requirement, they go into some new geography or whatever the case is. We're a natural home for that operation because they think that over time, they trust us to both modernize it, bring the latest technology, take advantage of AI and some of these other things, make sure the employees have a good home and that they can have a career path that goes beyond that one customer. And so that's why we've been pretty successful with that.

And it's a fascinating shift, right? Because part of what you're seeing in the market perpetually is with these LLM risk of more in-sourcing and you're seeing accelerated outsourcing, right? And part of that, I think, is part of our view is there's more of a skills mismatch from your clients internally. And they'd rather have you take that critical function as well as the ability to source talent and accounting certain areas haven't come out of public account and myself, the technology was driven more by a lack of ability to source, right? And I think this is just going to be another lever for you to really drive into. I wanted to -- because we didn't talk about it earlier, but one of the things maybe talk about Calastone just a little bit because with the blockchain technology you have through that acquisition, again, historically, you folks have really done a nice job, either building or acquiring technology and redeploying that across the enterprise. So maybe talk about the strategic rationale for Calastone and how you see opportunities to deploy that across existing SS&C?

Sure. And look, Calastone's a great business. We're really excited about it. It's got good numbers, standalone, right? So good growth numbers, good profitability numbers, and obviously, we will preserve those. But we also think that there's a fair amount of synergy. And the synergy on the revenue side is Calastone is the biggest part of their business, it's a network. It's a way to automate many of the flows that come into asset flows into regulated funds. So connecting the intermediaries, the distributors, the folks that manage the customers with the funds themselves. So we've got a much bigger pool for them to attract to their network, right? And then you get the network. You just get, okay, here's another 1,000 fund companies or whatever it is that you can put on the platform. And so that's one part of it. The other part of it, which has become much more of a topic of late is this tokenization and can you sell funds via tokens, things like that. I would say that it's not a huge part of our business right now, but we have all the capability. We've got maybe a dozen or so customers that either already have tokenized funds or are in the process of setting up tokenized funds. We're going to handle those funds for them. We have ones that we're doing today. Maybe 2 things that I would just point out, one being a tokenized is still a fund. It's still got regulatory reporting, tax reporting, virtually all of the work with the exception that the investor onboarding process, the process for accepting those transactions. Maybe a little more automated than it was, which we welcome because we -- that efficiency is kind of accrues to our benefit as well. So -- and so far, that's what we've seen. In a dozen or so funds that we have and we're doing all the same things with the exception that we've actually -- there's actually some new work being created because somebody's got to tokenize the asset itself and then put it on a blockchain somewhere, right? And that's still a part that Calastone does. And so it gives us one more capability.

Switching gears us a little bit to just the income statement role. You've had an incredible amount of momentum on the organic growth. And I think at the '24 Investor Day, build it out on 4% to 8% organic growth overall. And I think there is some initial skepticism to that. And over the last 2 years, you've produced 5% on average and the 26% guidance applies 5% too. Maybe talk about some of the building blocks that afford you the opportunity really -- and we've been pretty consistent with this, drive a structural change in the organic growth in the business. And we thought about it. I think part of it is price, part of its retention. Part of it is the AUA. But -- and one of the things, I think, that's been really underestimated is the shift in things in particular, in terms of the growth contributor there. Maybe talk about the evolution, it feels a little bit more like a revolution. Just given what we think is a structurally higher level of organic growth within a range?

I think it's -- look, I think it's maybe 3 or 4 things that I would point to. One being that the businesses that have not yet been growing. And I'm talking about a couple of years ago, had not at that point, been growing as much, just how much work we put into making sure we had the right leadership, making sure we had the right innovation process, making sure we were taking advantage of sales and marketing in the best way possible. And then paying attention to our customers, right, and having really satisfied customers that would be references and good partners for us. And so that's what we've been -- a big part of gives is -- it's a lot of little things, but it's execution. It's taking care of customers. It's focusing on product, focusing on sales and marketing. And then when you start to turn some of those pieces around the pieces that have always grown nicely, like fund administration and wait and some of the other ones, they just have to keep doing what they're doing, maybe do it a little bit better. And I think when you see that come together, the other thing to point out is, look, it's not all perfection, right? We had a pretty good '25, but we did that without a lot of help from Intralinks because we had a tougher M&A market. We need intelligent automation to grow a little faster than it did in '25. We need health care to grow a little faster than it did in '25. And we think those things will happen, right? So there's -- we are poised, I think, perhaps to kind of improve from here, but we've made a lot of progress.

Maybe talk to health care a little bit because I think you're right, there's been a lot of investment there, and it feels like things are starting to align where there could be potential for that business to maybe start to contribute a little bit more than it has historically.

Yes. Look, I think the -- we're really proud of the fact that we built a large-scale system cloud-native, brand-new, over 1 million hours of code and deployed it successfully and it's used in production and it does millions and millions of those transactions. That's the money Rx, right? And we think that in the pharmacy space, it's the only new system at scale. There's some fintech start-ups, but they have hardly any customers on there. And most of the people are running on pretty dated technology. So then it's, okay, how do you turn that into stuff that shows up in the financial statements. And I think we would say over time, right. So we're working on RFPs now for 1127 and 1128 and things like that. Some of our clients have trusted us with giving us some portion of the operation, sort of the lift-out scenario, which we very much appreciate, and we think that's positive in both directions. So we do think that our bet on health care has an outsized return. In the meantime, it's a relatively small part of SS&C that's profitable and is moving along okay. But we think that the point in time where it starts to return much more is coming.

If we just moving down the P&L a little bit more, there's obviously been a really nice margin story. And if you look at the margin trajectory of the business, there were some impacts in '22, '23 from Blue Prism as well as just some general inflation out there that you folks were able to absorb. Maybe talk about the margin trajectory of the business and how you're thinking about some of those GenAI efficiencies, philosophically in terms of reinvestment as opposed to maybe sharing that with investors more broadly? And does that afford you again an opportunity to then take on some of these larger wins like you've won in Australia, right, in terms of just bringing in these larger contracts that you're able to fully synergize over time?

Yes. And that's a -- on those lift-out contracts, it is, as you noted, they don't -- they -- obviously, they don't start at our corporate margins. In some cases, they might start and we'll try to get them to 30%, 40% over 18, 24 months, something like that. That is what we would view as a pretty reasonable kind of time frame. So as we look at that margin opportunity in our guidance for 2026, we committed to 50 basis points of margin improvement. We're going to end the year or try to end the year at 40%. So leave at 40%, whether that's in Q4 or something like that. And that brings us kind of back to where we were before we did all these acquisitions and have been entering in. And look, obviously, what's not included in there is if we do another big acquisition or if we do a number of big lift-outs in which case, they ought to be revenue opportunity that goes with that. We're finding that the margin part of this equation, while it's not comfortable, and it's hard work and people have to focus on it, is very much within our control, right? So in effect, what we're doing with automation and productivity is very good counter to some of the inflationary pressures that are out there. So our -- like everybody else, our technology providers, third parties as great as they are, would like price increases. Our employees get raises, our health care costs go up, so on and so forth, right? It's inflationary. There's a lot of things that are inflationary. What head count and productivity do for you, they allow you to offset that and then get some improvement. And I think that, that's a dial you have to decide how much you're going to turn. We have chosen to turn it in a pretty moderate way because we're not trying to be disruptive. We're trying to focus on growth and get a little bit of margin improvement along the way.

That's helpful. And obviously, you've seen that accrete to the cash flow very consistently. So maybe talk about some of the free cash flow growth. And then just philosophy around capital return? Because again, one of the things we focused on is just the meaningful shift away from deleveraging really to return on capital to shareholders and the dividends had a terrific, very consistent growth, but also you've been able to really lean into the buyback even a little bit more. And think part of that is just where the leverage sits and maybe talk about the range and free cash flow more broadly?

Yes. I think in terms of capital allocation priorities, at least in the short term, probably pretty similar to what we've been doing in the last couple of years. We're a little more secured towards buybacks, particularly if -- at these kinds of valuations and share price kind of ranges. We'll still pay down debt, right? So it will still be -- and then we'll look for acquisitions. A lot of that -- to come back to something you said, Kevin, that I didn't address we don't really think -- we think AI is a huge opportunity for us. We're taking advantage of that opportunity every place we can, and we think that will continue. We don't think that it requires some step change in R&D spend or something like that. We think that this free cash flow will be available for us to use in much the same way. Most of our philosophy on technological spend is, if you spend it wisely, it's much more about did you have 3 or 4 smart people leading the project? And then -- and that matters a lot more than did you have 50 or 100 or 150 people working on it, because it's technology. It's not supposed to be brute force. It's supposed to be intellect. And so we think there will be lots of opportunity for us to kind of continue to return money to shareholders the way we have been.

Your point on the tech spend, too. I mean you have a certain amount of capacity internal as well as balance with some of the external providers to that forge ability to be a little bit more efficient with that spend too, right?

No, that's exactly right. So we're always just trying to preserve options, right, more than anything else. That's true in our AI strategy. It's true in our data center and cloud strategy, where we're mostly -- we run our own private cloud, and we have a little bit of third-party cloud providers, right? And then you constantly get to say, okay, how much is this costing me? How much is this costing me and nobody has too big of an influence on. You don't ever really want to not that anybody would ever do it, except they do it pretty frequently, you don't really want to give somebody the power to be able to come in and impose whatever price increase they want and you sort of feel like you have no choice. So we try to leave ourselves with choices.

So maybe switching gears a little bit to the competitive dynamics because I haven't covered the stock for a while, there were some new entrants in the space in '21. A couple of those are in the process and going private again. Maybe talk about how you've seen the competitive dynamics change over the last 5 years, existing players, newer kind of technology that you've had to kind of compete against maybe talk to that. And I think a lot of it you centers on that doesn't get fully appreciated really in oil in the source code, right? And that's been a huge point of differentiation for you folks, particularly given the scale of your clients, but maybe talk to the competitive environment a little bit and using that more as a proxy for what the future can hold. Obviously, the future is a little bit harder to predict, but you've had a pretty good track record for 30-odd years now.

No, I appreciate that. And look, I think it does come down to the strength of the customer relationship more than anything else. If you have strong relationships, and we think we do, and lots of them. And you're doing mission-critical kind of comes back to, you're doing really important things for them, things that have to be correct, right, whether it's things with their end clients or things with regulators, then chances that you build some trust. And if you build some trust, they're more likely to do more things with you to take advantage of whether it's taking advantage of AI or it's taking advantage of tokenization or it's taking or partnering with you on some funded development for some project or something like that and that's dynamic we see. What we see is our customers are actively grappling with these problems. And a lot of times, they'll trust us with a project. And sometimes, they'll trust us, hey, just take it. Just do a lift out, just handle it. We trust you to do it, right? And that's hard to replicate or combat if you're a startup. Right, because look, what start-ups have is some technology, right, some really cool technology. And we like to think we have really cool technology, too, and we can build more technology than most people can -- but hey, they got a great tool. But then you go into a great big place and you're trying to sell them a great tool, and you solve one problem, right, where we're trying to solve 30 or 40 problems around the world at scale. We like our chances. And that's kind of been -- that's played out pretty well for us.

I think you see it, right? I mean your retention in the most recent quarter, I think it was 96.4%, something like that, right? And it's been increasing over time as has your clients' asset allocation has increased pretty meaningfully as well. Maybe talk to that a little bit as well just because there's been a lot of success there.

Yes. And also worth pointing out that these retention metrics are they're sort of the most punitive possible, right. All it is, is client losses, there's no credit for price increases or upsells or anything. So we're doing gross. We're not doing net, right? So as a measurement of -- if you're talking about like a couple of hundred basis points, whether it's 96 and change or 97 and change. For the most part, the biggest part of that is always going to be the funds of the clients that shut down over the course of the year, and that's stayed the same, right? So when there's more volatility that we get a little more of that when there's less, we get a little less of that. But in general, some percentage of people either get acquired or decide to close down, and that's the nature of it. And so it does speak to the strength of the business that, in general, these are very, very sticky relationships. You're in there, you're in there absent some real dissatisfaction, People really don't want to switch. Now sometimes that can work against us when we're trying to go win new customers. But the reality is that for whatever it is, there's plenty of dissatisfaction out in the marketplace. So that hasn't been taking market share and winning new business and taking away from other fund administrators or other providers, there's been plenty of opportunity.

I think, Rahul, you've had success to spin out, right, in terms of -- if you have a lower hedge fund. And again, I kind of -- they see somebody, you typically win that business as well. And I think there's been some recent examples of that.

Exactly right.

Yes. So any questions from the audience? Anything we didn't ask -- I mean you feel really, obviously, operationally, really, really strong, but just anything you want to share with the audience just given there's been so much market uncertainty and you folks continue to power through them and you just reported a terrific quarter, really, really good '26 guidance with accelerating growth and margin expansion, everything you'd expect, but just anything else to as we close this out here.

Yes. I would just say, while past performance, I think investment guys say this all the time, right? Past performance is not necessarily indicative, but it's usually a pretty good leading indicator, right? So we do think that what we've done really over our history and certainly what we've done over the last 6 years or so, is pretty indicative of what you're going to continue to see us do. So I think you'll continue to see us pay a lot of attention to those customer relationships and keep retention at a very high level. I think you'll continue to see us to opportunistically make acquisitions where they extend our product set or give us some capability, whether that's Calastone or Blue Prism or Curo or any of the other ones. And we have benefited -- and you'd have to -- this is a little bit of a history lesson, you'd have to go back to 2007 to figure this out. But when mobile first became a big deal, we took more fund administration market share than probably any other time in our history because we built the mobile apps, and we were in the -- we were the first ones in the Apple App Store and all these things. Some of these technological advancements, it's those kinds of opportunities, right? So obviously, look, there are some concerns and fears and they're, in some cases, warranted. But you always think about who's best positioned to take advantage. And we would say as incumbent with access to the source code in really protected markets, we're really well positioned to take advantage.

Well, I think you see that one other -- maybe just in the closing remarks here, there's been some sizable transactions in the sector, right, whether it was a dense being acquired by NASDAQ, SimCorp being acquired by Deutsche Borse and maybe not the same markets per se, but you can see the value of those assets given some of the multiples and I'm not implying that's where just they've been outsized, the type multiples that these companies have paid up for. And it feels like from a competitive perspective, you folks have only gotten better positioned.

Yes. And so the conversation I was having earlier with somebody was private equity administrators, right? And private equity fund administrators and what kind of multiples they get. We have the biggest private equity fund administration business in the world, right? It's growing faster, it's more profitable. It's got more, you want to try to put a multiple on that. I think you get a great big number, and it's just trying to appreciate all the parts.

Great. Great.

Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Thanks, everybody.